Monday, 2 January 2012

House of Bamboo (1955)

Sam Fuller only contributed additional
dialogue to the script for this, a film noir set in a deceptively Technicolored,
widescreen-rendered Japan,
and the difference is telling. The cute but essentially superfluous romance
between hero Robert Stack and local geisha Shirley Yamaguchi doesn’t offer the
emotional volatility or psychological nuance found in similar romances of
Fuller’s self-penned The Crimson Kimono
and Verboten!(both 1959), and that
means for a lot of the running time the familiar snap-crackle-pop of Fuller’s
bald, bold-type style and enriching humanist reflexes are kept on a leash.
However, it’s a Fuller film and make no mistake: set loose on foreign soil with
a large budget and a superlative technical crew, he builds House of Bamboo into a series of brilliantly directed set-pieces.
The story is dark and murderous, full of deception, intimate violence, kinky jealousy boiling up amongst male partners-in-crime, and lusciously weird visions of a
culture in a moment of violent upheaval. The opening shots are some of the most
brilliantly orchestrated in the history of widescreen cinema, with the
tourist-board friendly shot of Mt Fuji cut into by the huffing steam train,
which is then brought to a halt by a peasant’s cart stuck on the train. This
vision of technological, modernist, bluntly ugly age being stalled by a remnant
of a culturally specific workaday object is keen enough; the subsequent images
of men in the classical Japanese peasant garb assaulting the train drivers,
shooting the one American amongst the guard crew, and making off with the
military weaponry aboard, resolves in the image of a woman screaming over a
splay-legged corpse in a visually acute blast of ironic inversion, from old to
new, natural beauty to human ugliness.

The setting is 1950s-contemporary, in the
waning years of the American occupation of Japan, with the slowly recomposing
Tokyo and sense of reviving Japanese fortunes riddled with stark corruption and
uneasy alliances, and shots of the street life and the urban environs bring out
with a stark clarity just how transitory and provisional much of the
architecture and infrastructure of the city was at the time. It’s the
outsider’s view of a world familiar from the distracted, ground-level world of
the era-defining Japanese filmmakers like Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, and Mizoguchi.
Film noir was even by this time being caricatured as a series of
black-and-white visual clichés, but Fuller here completely, but effectively,
translates the style into Technicolor terms, offering bold, almost
carnival-like hues and precisely composed frames that both evoke Hitchcock’s
similarly radical sense of how to use colour, and also the visual acuities of
Japanese art. The dominant theme is cultural collision and cross-pollination,
as classically attired geishas and festival dancers rehearse on a skyscraper
rooftop, and entertainers perform in traditional fashion, before suddenly
stripping off their robes and starting to jitterbug. Fuller’s reportorial
instincts and experiential sense of zeitgeist are given free reign in this material. He absorbs through endless succinct shots the fascinating processes of Japan's modernisation and westernisation, as he does the incidental yet telling similarities between the police and the villains, each
methodically setting about their work, from the pin-pointed evidence of the
initial crime to the painstaking preparatory work by chief bad guy Sandy Dawson
(Robert Ryan). Sessue Hayakawa prefigures his Bridge on the River Kwai resurgence (although dubbed by Richard
Loo) in playing the Japanese equivalent of one of Fuller’s familiar no-nonsense
authority figures, as the police inspector Kito. Dawson’s harsh policy to leave
no wounded behind, killing anyone who gets clipped rather than leave them to be grilled by the
cops, provides both the first evidence that he and his fellow stick-up men are
still fighting the war, having turned the arts and assumptions of warfare into criminal
enterprise.

When Ryan’s mob try to finish off one
member in such a fashion after a robbery, Webber (Biff Elliot), the Japanese
police and their American liaisons manage to interview him before he finally
expires, and he begs them to keep his nefarious activities secret from the
local girl, Mariko (Yamaguchi), and keep her well out of the case, as his
comrades had no idea about her. Webber’s shady, violent army buddy Eddie
Spanier (Stack) turns up looking for his pal who offered him a job, a la Holly Martens in The Third Man (1949), and, after
tracking down Mariko, begins trying to shake down local pachinko parlours for
protection money, only to bring on Dawson’s wrath, for he runs the parlours.
Cue one of the most memorable introductions in cinema history, and also one of
the most inspired uses of the Cinemascope frame’s depth of field. As Spanier
roughs up a parlour boss in a back room, Dawson’s main man Griff (Cameron
Mitchell) stalks into the frame from the right, grabs Spanier, and clobbers him
in the jaw, sending him crashing back through the paper partition behind them,
revealing Dawson and the rest of the crew gathered and waiting for his crash
landing on the other side. It’s classic piece of physically forceful yet
resolutely simple staging, and both Mitchell’s overheated aggression and Ryan’s
supine authority are clearly displayed in our first glimpse of both. Spanier,
after getting roughed up and told off, is then recruited into the gang when his
background check turns up an impressive array of priors, whereupon the bluff is
revealed: the man pretending to be Spanier is actually US Army Sergeant Eddie
Kenner, and he’s trying to both bust up Dawson’s outfit and find his inside man
in the Tokyo Police.

House
of Bamboo is a work of
near-genius as filmmaking, even if Harry Kleiner’s script doesn’t ever quite
take things to the most ruthlessly intelligent level as Fuller was wont to do. The plotting leaves a
few explanations to be desired, such as how a mob of westerners can, without
disguises, repeatedly commit such daring robberies without bringing down the
special ire of the local cops or, indeed, the local yakuza: the fact that the
basic story has been transplanted without two much culturally specific thought
from the regulation cop-infiltrates-gang American noir is all too apparent.
Still, Fuller ransacks Kleiner’s script for nuances and radical
interpretations. Unlike in Verboten!,
the villains are not a subversive by-product of history and cultural collision,
but an imported force of American hoods. Yet as in Verboten!, the tale clearly takes
on an element of parable, warning about the dangers awaiting the new US
hegemony in the Cold War era in depicting one of its newly conquered
pseudo-fiefs. Dawson and Kenner are thus fittingly mirrored versions of the same,
quintessential American male, torn between making the world its stamping ground
and shepherding it back to self-direction, in a fittingly prognosticative move
on Fuller’s part. The title suggests quaint exotic kitsch redolent of the other,
badly aged Occupation-era movies like Teahouse
of the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara
(1957), but Fuller uses the motif of the bewilderingly (to western eyes) flimsy
style of Japanese interior architecture, with paper walls and hanging screens,
for a game of images, cutting the screen into box-like prisms and repeatedly
separating characters with thin partitions. These range from that first wall Kenner crashes through
to land at Dawson’s feet, locating the hard American force behind the seemingly
cowed, slapdash façade of modernising Japan, to the blind that Mariko lowers
between her and Kenner when they sleep beside each other in figuration of the
personal, cultural, and sexual divide between them, and in the finale, where a
silhouette glimpsed through a wall proves the undoing of Dawson’s attempt to
have Kenner killed by his own side. Using different materials but similar in
style are such moments as one of Dawson's men, Charlie (DeForest Kelley), keeps a clandestine watch on Mariko through the simple expedient of a huge reflecting bar-room mirror, and the scene in which Kenner, in his guise as Spanier, first tracks
Mariko, as she darts through the halls of a bathhouse, trying to elude him, and
then he tracks her through a park, Fuller’s panning camera revealing him hiding
behind a tree as she hurries past oblivious, before he finally catches her in
her apartment in a moment of distinctly sexualised frenzy. The film becomes through these layers of images a series of constantly shifting identities, permeable boundaries, paranoid surveillance, and changing allegiances.

This overt compartmentalisation has
other ramifications. Whilst the romantic byplay between Kenner and Mariko takes
up a bulk of the film’s pensive but overdrawn mid-section, the real emotional
intensity and threat comes from the peculiar relationship of Dawson, Griff, and
Kenner, where the need for absolute trustworthiness amongst comrades in enemy
territory is not so subtly infused with aspects of homosexual devotion and
envy, as Griff becomes increasingly frazzled and furious at Kenner’s slipping
into his place, Dawson turning cold on his trigger-happy former partner and
fixing with such immediate affection on the new boy that he forgoes the
leave-no-prisoners rule when Kenner is wounded during a heist. The homoerotic
tension is both displaced yet ratcheted higher by the self-consciously enforced
regime of heteronormative relations, with the men being paired with submissive,
emotionally inessential and yet forcibly dominated “kimono girls”. Kenner enlists Mariko’s
aid against her reservations to stand in for his squaw, leading to long sweaty
nights of discomfort as the pair have to pretend to be shacking up, with Mariko
being treated as a pariah by her neighbours as a result, whilst their real
attraction bubbles away. So dominant is this psychological obsession that when
Mariko is spotted meeting Kenner’s army contact, Capt. Hanson (Brad Dexter),
Dawson doesn’t assume she’s there to rat them out, but that she’s got other
guys on the side, and he gives her a good slap to make to make sure she stays
true. It’s like the ‘50s genre equivalent of The Iliad.

Whilst House of Bamboo takes a little too long to compose and entwine its
various themes, and doesn’t quite achieve the sheer compulsiveness of Fuller at
his greatest, the combustive moments, when they finally come, arrive in a flow
of moments of dazzling cinema. The heist on which Kenner is wounded is shot like a blend of
jazz and kabuki dance numbers, the fleeing criminals photographed in a deft
tracking shot against huge screen-like warehouse doors and twisting in
choreographed flourishes of physicality, leaving behind their smoke bombs that
fill the air with delirious smudges. Dawson has to abort a big heist, that sees
him using a political broadcasting bus as a Trojan Horse, when his mole rushes
to warn him that the cops are waiting for them: his assumption that it must
have been the jealous Griff who ratted him out, causes him to march into
Griff’s house and shoot him without warning in his bathtub, blasting holes that
spit water with vividly telegraphed corporeal impact in a moment that
anticipates the milk carton in The
Manchurian Candidate (1962) as well possessing, again, a potent homoerotic
force in the image of naked, defenceless Griff writhing as Dawson fills him
full of holes. When Dawson and underling Charlie finally realise Kenner is an
agent, they try to set him up for a violent death at the hands of the Tokyo cops, but instead German Expressionism is invoked
when Charlie’s silhouette is shot at by a cop, rather than Kenner, as was planned. Dawson makes his last
stand, evoking both the climaxes of White
Heat (1949) and Strangers on a Train
(1951), but staged more methodically than those two deliberately hysterical
finales, on a globe-shaped tilt-a-whirl elevated high above the city, as if the
story has slipped its immediate liminal situation, leaving behind the past, and
becomes instead a proto-Space Race movie, looking to where the next phase in
human aggression will take place. Kenner’s final gunning down of Dawson is
underlined not with pomp but with a distinctive note of the downbeat that
prefigures the forlorn, grim tone of the conclusions of antiheroic ‘70s cop
movies like The French Connection(1971) and The Seven-Ups (1974): the
“happy” epilogue of Kenner and Mariko walking together is so casually appended
that it hardly dispels this final note of romantic tragedy. Stack is
surprisingly sufficient to his role, managing to capture something of the
sullen, truculent aggression Sterling Hayden or Richard Widmark would have
brought to the role. Ryan and Mitchell are customarily punchy.

6 comments:

Oh, man. I think I actually saw this movie for the first time exactly a year ago. I remember loving the hell out of it -- even though I only watched it once. I agree with you that the romance between Robert Stack and the chick is pretty superfluous, although it didn't bother me too much since that's the kind of convention to be expected from Fuller's brand of melodrama.

That clip where Dawson shoots Griff in the bathtub was later featured in Minority Report, during the sequence when Cruise is getting his eyes taken out. Methinks Spielberg was paying tribute to Fuller because they'd worked together just decades earlier on 1941.

Hi Adam. Great to see you here. I suppose I'm more frustrated with the romance because Fuller usually created such roaring hot male-female relationships - a la Park Row, The Crimson Kimono, Shock Corridor, 40 Guns; he knew how to invest conventions with strange new life, and was particularly keen when there was some sort of overt cultural, racial, or political conflict surrounding the pair. But here it's just too cute, resisting his attempts to shake it up, whilst it dominates the film's middle, slow third. He also knew his way around suggestively gay themes too (I Shot Jesse James) and here he seems to pour his interest into that element by way of compensation for the problematic foreground romance.

Yes, Minority Report. Fuller was I am sure always a strong influence on Spielberg - there's just too much of The Steel Helmet and The Big Red One in Saving Private Ryan to be coincidence, for instance. Also, when Scorsese listed Fuller amongst his sources for The Departed, I think this one was what he was thinking of, with the dual-mole theme and the perverse closeness of anti-hero and villain.

Excellent review of this underrated Fuller film. Even fans of his don't seem to talk about this one much but it certainly has its merits and you so eloquently pointed out. Man, it has been too long since I've seen this. Must revisit.

Hi JD. I have, on the other hand had, over the years, encountered people who recalled it vividly, so it started to take on a mythic patina in my mind. The result isn't quite as Fuller-y as I'd hoped for, but as an example of great directing goes, it's the top.